1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an imaging apparatus and method, and a storage medium having embodied thereon a computer program for executing the imaging method.
2. Description of the Related Art
Imaging devices (image sensors), such as charge coupled devices (CCD) or complementary metal oxide semiconductors (CMOS), which are provided in imaging apparatus such as camcorder or digital still camera, have become capable of realizing high resolution of six million pixels or more, and furthermore, now have high speed reading capabilities of 60 frames or more per second. To process image data output from an imaging device at high speed, a pipe line processing method has been used. Meanwhile, in a high resolution imaging device, the number of pixels per line is steadily increasing, and thus the capacity of line memories has become enlarged, and the size of circuits included in an imaging apparatus has also become enlarged.
Japanese Patent Laid-Open Gazette No. 2004-312072 discloses a method of reducing the size of an image processing circuit by sharing a memory, instead of including a plurality of memories corresponding to a multiple number of image processing operations. Also, as described in Japanese Patent Laid-Open Gazette No. 2004-297653, a method of reducing the capacity of a memory by storing data that is compressed and encoded, instead of storing non-compressed and large capacity image data output from an imaging device, wherein the compressed and encoded image data is decoded just before interpolation.
However, even when a memory is shared or image data is compressed and encoded as described in Japanese Patent Laid-Open Gazette No. 2004-312072 or 2004-297653, when image data output from an imaging device, that is, RAW data, is being processed, the image data is usually being written to a storage medium like a synchronous dynamic random access memory (SDRAM) which is outside of an image processing circuit. Accordingly, when writing the image data output by the imaging device with high resolution and high speed output, to the SDRAM at high speed, power consumption is increased.